The present invention relates to a method of shaping a material of a food into a specific shape and to a hardness and taste which would be achievable with hand-shaping or hand-rolling. The present invention is also related with an apparatus for practicing such a method.
Various foodstuffs are known which are prepared by hand-shaping predetermined amounts of rice, meat or like material into desired shapes. Typical examples of this kind of foodstuffs may be sushi, hamburger steak and croquette. Such a type of process relying on manual work is not suitable for mass production due to the need for many workers and the poor yield. Nevertheless, there is an increasing demand for such processed foods in parallel with the recent worldwide change of diet. This demand cannot readily be met, however, due to the ever increasing labor cost.
Sushi, for example, has come to win polularity particularly in the dietary aspect. Sushi is a hand-rolled block of rice which should be constant both in amount and in shape. Hand-rolling, however, cannot avoid irregularity in shape or size or prepare a large number of blocks at a time. Only the qualified persons with a long time of experience and skillful with their fingers can roll rice to a constant size at a commercially acceptable rate. Such persons are rare today and, if employed, would make the business ill-paid due to the prohibitive wages. Thus, mechanical means would prove quite convenient if realized to shape rice into blocks of sushi as hard and tasty as skillful hand-rolling. However, hardly any propositions have heretofore been made on such a type of food shaping apparatuses. A food shaping method is known which employs a mold of wood formed with recesses to the shape of sushi and prepares sushi by filling the recesses with rice and compressing it strongly from above. Yet, the resulting sushi is usually too hard and cannot attain the taste which is peculiar to hand-rolling. Should the rice be compressed with a smaller force to adjust the hardness, it would fall off the shaped block into mere grains.